Facebook enters the fitness tracking market with Moves app purchase

It looks like 2014 is the year of company purchases for Facebook. After acquiring WhatsApp for $19 billion and Oculus VR for $2 billion, if you thought that Facebook would end there, we wouldn’t blame you. The company behind fitness tracking app Moves announced that its been purchased by the social network, effectively thrusting Facebook into the fitness tracking market.

In a blog post, ProtoGeo Oy, the maker of Moves, made the announcement: “Since we launched Moves, we’ve been focused on running a simple and clean activity diary that million of people have enjoyed using. Now, we’re joining Facebook’s talented team to work on building and improving their products and services with a shared mission of supporting simple, efficient tools for more than a billion people.”

According to the company, the app will continue to operate as a standalone app, with Facebook’s press release echoing those sentiments. According to a Facebook spokeswoman, Moves will continue to operate separately from Facebook, though the company’s employees will head to Facebook’s offices in London and California. In addition, the Facebook spokeswoman said that the social network will not use any data from the Moves app, though that could change.

This purchase further highlights Facebook’s intense focus on mobile. It joins Facebook’s widening mobile portfolio, which includes Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the recently-updated half social network, half Flipboard app, Paper. Moves seems to fit the mold nicely, given its average four-rating on both the App Store and Google Play, as well as its 4 million+ downloads.